The Nowhere Neighbourhood London Is Building a New District Where No Local Can Afford to Live Wendell Steavenson

1 PROSPECT The nowhere neighbourhood London is building a new district where no local can afford to live wendell steavenson here haven’t been elm trees in Nine Elms, in south encompasses not only the power station site but a giant swathe west London, for 300 years. When the railway of the Borough of Wandsworth and part of neighbouring Lam- reached the south bank of the Thames at Batter- beth. The numbers are huge: £15bn of investment, 25 different sea in 1838, the area was a swamp dotted with wind- sites to be built over 25 years, 16 developers, 16,000 new homes, mills. By the end of the 19th century, when Charles 25,000 new jobs and over half a million square metres of mixed TBooth mapped the socio-economic classes of London, the area use development. There will be office blocks, residential towers, was industrial, and included a coal wharf, a saw mill, gasworks and a redeveloped New Covent Garden Market. “London’s Diplo- and coke works. A few tenement streets were marked in black matic Quarter” proclaim the advertising posters around the moat which, according to Booth’s categorisations, designated “the low- of the new American Embassy, a shiny cube covered with an exo- est class, vicious, semi-criminal.” skeleton of halberd-shaped spike-arcs. The Dutch Embassy is On the A-Z London map from 2000, there are no longer any also relocating south of the river and the Chinese are apparently residential streets in the area. Instead there are only the brown interested in moving from their gloomy Portland Place mansion. outlines of HM Stationery Office, New Covent Garden Market, There will be two new tube stations along a Northern Line exten- a Sorting Office and Battersea Power Station (disused). Two sion. There are even plans for a footbridge across the river to Pim- access roads end in a beige unmarked territory, as if there were lico (although Pimlicans are up in arms). Nine Elms is the largest nothing there at all. development in London and when it’s done, the capital will have Recently I cycled along Nine Elms Lane through grit sprayed filled a wasteland with a whole new neighbourhood. It will take a up by the cement trucks grinding past. It is a noisy place of metal generation to build. thunderclaps and jack-hammer drilling. Muddy builders in fluo- After almost a century of urban sprawl towards the home coun- rescent yellow vests man temporary traffic lights and cranes loom ties, London is turning back again to face the river and rediscover- over the plywood construction hoardings. Among all this building ing its canals—no longer moving out but moving back in. Moving work still stands the famous silhouette of Battersea Power Sta- east, there is a new “International Quarter” around the Olym- tion, its four 103-metre chimneys in various stages of destruction pic Park in Stratford, a new postcode, N1C, at King’s Cross, and and reconstruction. “London’s Emerging Cultural District” is rising out of abandoned The 40 acres of the old power station development are the docklands on the Greenwich Peninsular. The artists’ impressions centrepiece of the vast Nine Elms “Opportunity Area,” which of what to expect describe clean and modern lines, green lozenges of lawn, glass balconies with a bicycle and a café table for two. The architecture cuts new lines through the Victorian-Georgian ter- races of London, just as it is doing in Manchester, Birmingham and Edinburgh. But most people cannot afford to live in this shiny new Wendell Steavenson is a writer and journalist future. In the midst of this dynamic upthrust is the sense of an PROSPECT THE NOWHERE NEIGHBOURHOOD 2 uncomfortable paradox, one that is especially evident in Lon- mark against their name for living in a council house. Now if you don. That these new developments are investment opportuni- are brought up on an estate you’re immediately assumed to be on ties for overseas buyers who do not live in them. And thousands Benefits Street.” of them are being built in the middle of a city that’s at the centre A property-owning class was created in the 1980s by privatisa- of a national housing crisis. tion. Belton told me that in Wandsworth about a third of the sold- off council homes were now privately rented. (That seems to be ony Belton moved to Wandsworth in the mid-1960s the figure across London; and inevitably a number of those prop- because, he said, “it was incredibly cheap.” Back erties are rented back to the council.) It used to be, Belton said, then there were still tanneries and factories along the that none of his fellow Labour councillors would have owned more Thames. “Filthy. Stinking. I remember a thing called than their own house, but now, “I am amazed how many of us are Tthe ‘Battersea smell.’” He smiled and admitted he was prob- landlords. It’s almost immoral.” ably part of the first wave of gentrification, “the new genera- The windfall from council house sales went to central govern- tion of university graduates, looking for places to live.” When ment. It then cut local government housing grants and reduced Belton was elected as a Labour councillor in 1971, the borough councils’ ability to borrow, which slowed the construction of pub- was “rock-solid Labour.” As the decade wore on and factories lic housing. Over the past quarter of a century, London’s popula- continued to close, Labour lost ground and the Conservatives tion has increased by two million to 8.6m, almost as many as the took over in 1978. They’ve held power ever since. In 1979, when 1939 all-time high. But little new public housing has been built by Thatcher entered No 10, Wandsworth had 40,000 council prop- councils since the 1980s, while the number of private new builds erties. Over the next few years, under her government’s right- has remained consistent. The job of providing social housing has to-buy policy, 18,000 of them were sold at a discount to council been devolved to housing associations. tenants. I met Belton in his Victorian house off Clapham High When Ken Livingstone was elected mayor in 2000, things Street. He is still a Wandsworth councillor, friendly and some- changed. He said London was an important global city; we should what rueful. I asked him about the effect of right-to-buy, two be looking to New York and Shanghai, not Manchester or Paris. generations later. He urged a rethink of planning regulations and an open attitude “Social, economic. It’s the whole gamut,” he said, tilting his to more ambitious projects—the Shard, for example. Livingstone head. “When I started in politics Macmillan was prime minis- wanted to build a new London, but he had almost no money. The ter. Council housing was the solution to the post-war housing cri- Treasury is highly centralised so that London controls only 7 per sis. There was so much of it back then that no one had a black cent of all taxes paid by residents and businesses compared to over 50 per cent in New York and 77 per cent in Tokyo. The way for- ward, Livingstone believed, was to get private developers to build public housing. They would be encouraged by liberalised planning regulations and the scope of a city-wide “London Plan,” and in return their projects would include a proportion of affordable homes. (The term “affordable” is slippery—it tends to indicate homes where rent is pegged to the median borough income.) Each planning application would be negotiated by councils on its indi- vidual merits, rather than regulatory templates, and the Greater London Authority (GLA) would coordinate the big picture. “In the midst of this dynamic, kinetic, upthrust is the sense of an © MIKE KEMP/GETTYIMAGES uncomfortable paradox” 3 THE NOWHERE NEIGHBOURHOOD PROSPECT attersea Power Station was decommissioned in 1983. For 30 years successive owners, developers and archi- tects drew up plans for the site—a theme park, a shop- ping centre, Chelsea Football Club’s new stadium—but Bthe costs of preserving the crumbling, iconic Grade II-listed land- mark scared them all away. In 2012 the site was sold to a Malaysian Consortium consisting of two huge developers and a pension fund. Gordon Adams, Head of Planning for the site, told me: “There are a lot of people working on the project who were here under the previous owners and when you ask them: ‘Is there a difference between them and the new owners?’ they say, ‘No, the master plan was fine, it was just that they didn’t have enough zeros.’” Adams and I met in the site headquarters, which is housed in a hand- some left-over brick Victorian building (soon to be demolished) overlooking the giant hole into the Northern Line extension and another giant hole into the Thames Tideway shaft, London’s new super-sewer. “There hasn’t been a development of so much square footage as this one since Canary Wharf,” he told me. “The original developers of Canary Wharf went bust,” I said. But it was hard not to be swept up in his enthusiasm. Starchi- tects Frank Gehry and Norman Foster have designed buildings that will flank the old power station and face each other across a curvy street that will be called Electric Boulevard. A sliver of park along the river will extend and open the Thames pathway to the public. The power station itself will be mostly filled with office space (Apple UK has announced a lease) with penthouses on the top floors.

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